The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion

High priests of Cybele usually bore the name of Attis, and their bloodletting suggests that they were impersonating his own self-mutilation. This ritual may have replaced an earlier human sacrifice, and the priests may have been members of the royal household.

The second section refers to the story of Marsyas, a Phrygian satyr beloved of Cybele, who comforted the goddess over the death of Attis by playing sweetly on his flute. Growing over-proud of his abilities, Marsyas challenged Apollo to a music contest, and when he lost, he was tied to a pine tree and flayed and dismembered. The close resemblance between Marsyas and Attis suggests that the priests who born the name and adopted the persona of Attis were originally ritually sacrificed on the sacred tree. A number of other such sacrifices occurred at sacred gallows-trees, such as the Norse god Odin, who was known as Lord of the Gallows and is believed to have been sacrificed by hanging from a tree. Similarly, there is evidence that effigies of the goddess Artemis were ritually hung at more than one site in ancient Greece.

The third section of the chapter argues that the spread of cults, such as that of Cybele and Attis, undermined the fabric of Greek and Roman civilizations. While Greek and Roman society was founded on the “subordination of the individual to the community” and the primacy of the commonwealth, these new religious suggested that the “communion of the soul with god” (359) was the only end worth living for and promoted a disdain for worldly affairs. Frazer argues that tendencies led to a collapse of the body politic and a relapse into barbarism from which civilization did not begin to recover until the end of the Middle Ages.

Christian festivals celebrating the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ assimilated animist rituals. According to the Julian calendar, December 25 was the Winter Solstice, which was regarded as the nativity of the sun or the Persian deity Mithra. In Syria, the sun was declared to have been born to a virgin, and in Egypt, it was represented by the image of a newborn baby. Easter celebrations replaced the celebration of the resurrection of Attis. The Festival of John the Baptist in June replaced an animist festival of water, the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin replaced a celebration of Diana, and All Souls replaced a festival of the dead. Parallels also exist between Christianity and Buddhism, both of which were founded by ascetic individuals, who looked for meaning beyond worldly satisfactions. Frazer argues that, as both religions grew, they absorbed many of the older customs and beliefs they were supplanting. This was, in part, a question of survival because the values of poverty and celibacy, which are foundations in both religions, were incompatible with the survival of the species.

This chapter considers Osiris, the Egyptian counterpart of Adonis, and Attis. Osiris was born from the earth-god Seb and the sky-goddess Nut. He was married to his sister, Isis. Osiris ruled as a king on Earth and was credited for converting the Egyptians from cannibalism to agrarianism, teaching them to gather wheat and barley, to pick fruit from trees, and to make wine from grapes. Afterwards, he traveled the world, bringing civilization and agriculture with him.

Osiris’s jealous brother, Set, plotted against him, tricking him into lying down in a coffin then welding it shut and throwing it into the Nile. Bereft, Isis took refuge among the swamps of the Delta, accompanied by seven scorpions. When one of the scorpions stung a human child whose mother had shut the door in Isis’s face, the goddess took pity on the grieving mother and resurrected her child. Her own son, Horus, was also stung by a scorpion but revived by the god Thoth.

The coffin of Osiris floated to Byblus, on the Syrian coast, where it was enclosed in the trunk of an Erica tree. The King had the tree cut down and made into a pillar for his home, unaware of the presence of Osiris’s body. Disguised as a mortal, Isis traveled to Byblus and was hired as a wet nurse for the king’s son. When the queen caught her burning away all that was mortal in the child (in an attempt to make him immortal), Isis revealed herself, causing the youngest of the king’s sons to die of fright. Isis was given the coffin, leaving the tree to be venerated in a temple in her honor. She took the king’s eldest son with her, and he, too, perished, either by drowning or after the goddess looked on him in anger.

When Set discovered Osiris’s body, he tore it into 14 pieces and scattered them. Isis gradually found the body parts and buried them where she found them, and a temple to Osiris was founded on each burial site.

When Isis and her sister Nepthys uttered a lament for Osiris (which closely resembled Aphrodite’s mourning for Adonis), the sun-god Ra took pity on them and resurrected Osiris as the god of the underworld. The divine sisters’ mourning for Osiris was traditionally reenacted at every burial, ritualistically casting the deceased as Osiris.

The Egyptian festival of Osiris, in which lamps were lit in all the houses, was a festival of the dead in general. Similar customs existed among Indigenous peoples in Alaska, California, Mexico, and South East Asia. These rites also parallel the Feast of All Souls, which is still practiced across Europe, which suggests that this Christian festival has non-Christian origins.

Like Astarte and Cybele, Isis was a goddess of fecundity, but she differed from her forebears in her fidelity to her husband. Like Osiris, she was probably a corn deity. The imagery depicting Isis, especially during the decadent phase of the Roman Empire, has much in common with the Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary.

Adonis, Attis, and Osiris are each coupled with a goddess whose power exceeds their own. This superiority of the goddess may reflect a society governed by maternal lineage, or a mother-kin system. Frazer provides two examples in which a matrilineal social structure results in a prevalence of goddesses over gods: the Khasis of Assam and the Pelew Islanders. He underlines that matrilineage is not tantamount to matriarchy and that women in such cultures often have little social power.

This chapter draws parallels between the Egyptian Osiris and the Greek Dionysus or Bacchus. Although best-known as a god of wine and grapes, Dionysus was also a god of trees, agriculture, and corn. Dionysus was believed to have died a violent death and been resurrected, and this sequence of events was re-enacted at his festivals. The infant Dionysus, son of Zeus, was attacked and dismembered by the Titans while sitting on his father’s throne, wielding his thunderbolt. In the version recounted by the poet Nonnus, the god evaded capture for some time by changing shape and had assumed the form of a bull when he was finally overpowered.

Dionysus is often depicted in animal shape, especially as a bull or a goat, which might seem inconsistent with his being a deity of vegetation and crops. During religious celebrations, worshippers would kill a live bull or goat and eat its meat raw, apparently believing themselves to be consuming the body and blood of their god.

The myth of Persephone and Demeter shares many characteristics with the other narratives of death, mourning, and resurrection: A goddess mourns the loss of a loved one who is associated with the natural world in general and with corn in particular, dying in the winter and returning to life in the spring. The difference is that, rather than mourning a dead lover or husband, the Greek myth contains a bereaved mother mourning her daughter.

After Pluto, the Lord of the Underworld, abducted Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, Demeter stopped the seeds from growing in the earth. Zeus intervened and obliged Pluto to restore his bride to her mother, but Pluto tricked Persephone, giving her pomegranate seeds to eat so that she was obliged to return to him. In the end, it was decided that Persephone should spend two thirds of every year above ground with her mother and the remaining months in the underworld.

Considering the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Sicilian celebrations of Demeter and Persephone, Frazer concludes that Demeter represents the sowing and the seed corn and Persephone the ripe ears and the harvest. Frazer points to the complexities of this embodying of two divine persons in one crop, whereby the seeds represent both the mother and her dead and living daughter.